Client: HIP Developments

Overview

A radiant five-storey archway and reflective façade overlooking the banks of the Grand River, Hello, Hello serves as the front yard and welcome mat for a new district revitalizing the edge of Cambridge’s downtown.

Passersby are invited to deliver a greeting or message at one of the three mic stations arrayed at the arch’s base—to their friends, a stranger, the city, or the river. (“Hello River, how are you?”) Voices travel up the archway in shafts of colour, transforming into a playful message of music and light. While voices intermingle to create a singular harmonic moment, the wave-sculpted façade that serves as Hello, Hello’s backdrop reflects the constantly evolving scene before it.

Goals

In our Babelesque world so often confined to the size of a screen, we wanted to create a new ritual that reminds people the importance of physical connections. A ritual that emphasizes the music and harmonics of how we communicate, both with humans and the environment around us.

Inspired by a kids’ game of broken telephone, where the inputs and outputs don’t always exactly match, Hello, Hello is all about presence, the non-verbal, and what’s missing from our online communications. By using the human voice to create musical bridges between people, it’s an invitation to connect beyond words.

Additional Information

When someone offers a greeting or message into one of the mic stations, their voices are modulated through a vocoder into lyrical electronic phrases, the words then transposed into echoing notes from a piano. Meanwhile, shafts of light travel up the archway carrying the message. In reconstructing the message, Hello, Hello accounts for the speaker’s tone, cadence, and duration, rendering every message as unique. When multiple voices communicate together, patterns of light and sound mix into one chorus. Sometimes it may feel like a voice is dissolving or floating away on the air, reminding us how our own bubbles and biases can sometimes get in the way of how we hear each other.